Peace has broken out, sorta, in southeastern Ukraine. No one is agreeing to anything, and both sides are taking the occasional pot shot but compared with just 30 days ago, things are peaceful.
When I wrote for Rantburg's Mexican desk, this happened occasionally as well, where the narceauxs would leave things alone until shipping day, or until a local gang decided to "heat up the plaza". Peace, as it were, would be brief and the return to fighting between the government and the narceauxs would begin anew.
Part of what is happening is that Russia has removed some top commanders from the front line, and has shuffled the leadership, at least in Donetsk. Also, I saw a recent foto of a top Donetsk formation commander, Arsen Pavlov, commander of the "Spartak" Battalion in a desert setting holding a Syrian national flag. I suspect at least some of his staff and cadre were ordered to Syria. Pavlov is a prior service Russian marine.
It is hard to imagine the Russians didn't also order others as well to go to Syria. Having stripped their forces of experienced fighters and commanders, and having a devil of a time recruiting, plus an ammunition shortage, may all have been factors in the current truce.
It has been a year since I started following the civil war in southeastern Ukraine, and I have written more than 150 stories, attempting to detail where the fighting was, and the nature of that fighting without getting bogged down in the wherefores and the politics. I let paid media embarrass themselves taking dictation for whichever side, with little old me preferring to report on just the facts on the ground from both sides. I was critical of both sides, and I refused to believe the copious amounts of bullsh*t emanating from both sides.
Not many people read my stories over the past year, and at first I thought that maybe readers were practicing Irish democracy, but then I realize that most of us here in the US do not care about what the Russians and Ukrainians do to one another.
Russia is a subject of lifelong study with me since my college days. I have studied Russian literature, Russian culture and Russian history, all without the benefit of classrooms or teachers.
I briefly have corresponded with Soviet Army formation commanders before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. My first novel was about WWII in Russia. I even learned a little bit about Russian language so the dialogue would sound realistic. I did all of these things, not as a professional, but as a working stiff in machine shops and the like. I love Russia, but I don't like their friends, and I didn't like what they were doing in Ukraine.
A recent anecdote, which may be apropos:
I recently joined a Facebook group, the International Federation of Independent journalist, formed by two Russian militiamen in Donetsk. I have specific reasons for joining not related to the group itself, but who was in the group, reasons which I won't go into here.
Understand the IFIJ, in my estimation, is a Russian sponsored front group.
Anyway, one of the founders, Pavel Rasta, is a good Russian writer and poet, as well as a fighter for the Donetsk militia, and has been posting some of his writing on the wall. One of them was an opinion piece on why he was there fighting against fascism. One fella from Saint Petersburg suggested that he post it in amren.com. In fact, he said, you should invite Amren.com's founder Jared Taylor into the IFIJ.
The relevant thread was deleted, so don't bother looking.
I don't have to tell this crowd who Taylor and Amren is, so I chimed in saying what a terrible idea that was. It isn't like Taylor needs this group, I said and this group doesn't need his racial theories on their wall. I said it would be easier to explain to American audiences why you didn't invite him than to explain why you did.
My last statement was (paraphrasing from memory): "I don't have a dog in this fight. I am a writer just writing about the war."
Taylor never got the invite and the IFIJ group has been dormant since that time, as has been the fighting in Ukraine. I have attempted to bring in my own sense of what is right and what is wrong in my reportage, and have tried to influence those there on the ground in Donetsk with my views. I have been an honest broker of information, and I think in that, I have succeeded in shedding more light on the subject than my paid competition.
I will continue to follow events in Ukraine as they unfold. At the moment, the Right Sector political movement is raising holy hell with the current Ukrainian government, and that is a subject worth noting for now.
There is so much I want to say about my activities with regard to the war, but for now, the war reporting is over in Donetsk.
Chris Covert writes about foreign military issues for Rantburg.com. He can be reached at grurkka@gmail.com and on Twitter. You can read past articles about the 2014 war in southeastern Ukraine by clicking here.
#1
I've read them, badanov, and startled the unexpecting when the subject came up in conversation. The things I've read on Rantburg over the years have led to quite a few such startlements over the years -- apparently I don't look like the kind of person who would know such things.
#2
Two things went through the eastern side of this. One, Vlad asked for 'volunteers' for Syria, and winter's coming. Two, they need to give the opposition time to relax and disengage. Then the next round begins. Give time for maskirovka to work.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
09/13/2015 13:50 Comments ||
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#3
Excellent piece! I hope you're writing for someone besides us badanov [or the bastids are reading the Burg]. If not, your talents are bit under utilized.
[Breitbart] I am watching Don Lemon on CNN. They are talking to Republican talking heads.
If this is what they think Republican voters are I am so glad that I have NOTHING to do with the GOP.
Does the media even begin to understand that for most conservatives, Obama is yesterday's news? We got it! I believe we are MUCH more offended by Boehner and McConnell and the rest of the GOP establishment.
We expect to disagree with the progressive left. But we have been betrayed and lied to by "our own." Over that, I, for one, am D O N E with all of them. We are never going to fix our nation by starting with D.C.
Maybe it is because I just spent the day in media and politician hell, but I really am so frustrated by everyone who just keeps bringing it back to what politician X or Y did.
I just saw my appearance on CNN. I recorded it earlier today. They edited the heart out of it. I wish they would have left the real conversation -- the meaningful conversation Don and I had.
I am done with this. If I can't fix my own radio show and get my own show to begin to take action of healing, help and decency then I need to go away myself.
I don't know how much more I can do and fail. This isn't about anyone else but me. Maybe I need to leave the media and public life and just walk the walk in my own neighborhood and life.
Each of us are going to be held responsible for our own actions and our friends, family and everything that is meaningful is on fire and we are engaging in a clown show or an angry venting.
Both are important, but I just can't do it anymore.
Ben Franklin said around 1773 that he could no longer be with friends anymore. Because most failed to understand the gravity of what was really happening in the world.
He felt almost dirty by talking about normal things. I feel the same way. God is going to make me account for every moment of air-time, every word and every action I chose to put my effort behind. Never followed him much, but I can certainly relate to his frustration. He sounds very authentic here.
#1
The big story that everyone ignores with their fixation on Washington, DC is that at the local and state levels, with a few very blue exceptions, Tea Party Republicans have been achieving pluralities and majorities throughout the country.
The march through the political institutions is happening again, only this time it is Tea Partiers.
[WASHINGTONEXAMINER] Jeremy Corbyn, whose steady and surprising march to victory runs parallel to Sen. Bernie Sanders ...The only openly Socialist member of the U.S. Senate. Sanders was Representative-for-Life from Vermont until moving to the Senate for the rest of his life in 2006, assuming the seat vacated by Jim Jeffords... ' unexpected success in the Democratic presidential race, is a shambling, self-righteous repository of every second-rate, lazy, 1960s Marxist nostrum. And Labour's activists can't get enough of him. They haven't just picked the lowest card in the deck; they have slammed it belligerently on the table, giving Corbyn 59.5 percent of the votes in a four-candidate race. Fifty-nine point five percent for a man who has never held any office, who has spent 30 years rebelling against his party, and whose speaking style makes Ron Paul look like a mesmerising demagogue.
Corbyn's victory speech was a precursor of what is to come. He might have tried to reach out, to be emollient, to reassure voters that not everything they read about him was true. Instead, he ran through some Leftist boilerplate about inequality punctuated by repeated attacks on the media.
His supporters lapped it up, but Labour moderates are in despair. Many of the party's senior figures have already declared that they won't serve under Corbyn, and there is a real chance that they will break away, forming a rival Center-Left party and thus, under Britannia's first-past-the-post system, giving the Conservative Party a decade of easy election wins.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2015 00:00 ||
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It won't go away. It may go into remission, but it'll come back when given the opportunity. People covet. People hate other people. People steal. Socialism is just a organized form of such group behavior. Appealing to base instincts of the creature never has found an empty audience.
BLUF:
[The American Interest] For all this we can blame the Nazis, because the moral ricochet over time is clear, and it is in many ways very noble. It’s nice that the Germans want to be moral, isn’t it? But absent a heavy doze of Niebuhrian moral realism, they now risk letting dead Nazis derange living thought from beyond the grave. At this point, sober Germans are worried about money, about what all this will cost. But this is not really about money. It’s about much more important kinds of business, political business ultimately, and politics is trump.
I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will. And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key. Then there will be a problem, and it will ultimately be a problem for Americans as well as for Europeans. Doesn’t it always go like that, again, whether we like it or not? The 'moral ricochet', a profoundly accurate assessment. I have actually heard Germans describe the condition in similar terms. But before we label the Germans 'insane', a little self-examination. There are many familiar examples of our own moral ricochets; 'The Civil Rights Movement' and 'The Great Society' are but two.
Lastly, a ricochet can be just as deadly as a well placed shot.
#1
And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key.
If Europe's choices are between Muslim occupation and Russian domination, I know what I'd advise.
Well, since they're not only demonstrated their total incapacity for self-rule, but actually infected their erstwhile American keepers with the same disease....
#4
If Europe's choices are between Muslim occupation and Russian domination, I know what I'd advise.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru
We ALL know what you'd advise
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/13/2015 10:00 Comments ||
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#5
Well East Germany certainly knows a bit about Russian domination, and we will make sure that Muslims won't dominate anything here.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
09/13/2015 13:15 Comments ||
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#6
There are strong indications that 'Russian domination' and 'Muslim/Sharia rule' are not mutually exclusive.
Merkel's destructive politics shouldn't be unwelcome to Putin. Her bad example has already boosted his ally Orban's name recognition and probably also his popularity in Germany.
Is she playing 'bad cop' to drive parts of the EU into Putin's arms?
[HotAir] Prepare to be shocked. Regardless of what turns up in Hillary Clinton's emails in the weeks and months to come, you won't need to worry about the Justice Department coming along and dragging the former Secretary of State off in handcuffs. Deleting all of those emails was, in the opinion of the nation's top cops, absolutely fine and dandy.
The Justice Department is affirming that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had the right to delete personal emails from her private server.
Government lawyers made the assertion in a court filing this week in a public records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, an advocacy group. The legal filing says "there is no question" that Clinton could have deleted personal emails without agency supervision and could have done so even if she'd been using a government server.
Some additional coverage at Buzzfeed turns up this nugget.
The back-and-forth over the preservation order, as part of a narrow FOIA case, does not address the classification issues that still command sustained political coverage about Clinton.
But in terms of the email submission itself, the lawyers argue that, without reason to believe that Clinton was not honest and forthcoming in selecting and turning over her federal records, no government agency would be required to "recover deleted material based on unfounded speculation that responsive information had been deleted." Such was the case with Clinton, the lawyers say.
That's a fairly amazing argument summed up in only a few words. On the one hand they offer a nod to the fact that Clinton repeatedly lied about sending and receiving classified data on this account. (Classified? Why would you think that satellite photos of North Korean nuclear installations were classified?) But in the very next breath they argue that retention of all of the emails to sort out what was or wasn't of value was not required because there was no reason to believe that Clinton was not honest and forthcoming.
The mind doth boggle.
Say... I wonder if the IRS would be willing to allow me to go through all of my tax documents, decide which ones were "relevant" and just toss the rest in the old burn barrel? I mean, there's no reason to think I wasn't being honest and forthcoming, so pesky little details such as those should be left to my discretion. Even more to the point, if something of interest to the police takes place on my property and it's captured by my security cameras, I suppose I can decide which footage is relevant and worthy of retention. This is truly wild.
I'm sure it's just my suspicious nature cropping up again, but doesn't it seem like there are some folks in the Justice Department who prefer to take a decidedly hands off approach when it comes to Clinton? It was only this week when we discovered that they had been handed a case which seemed to clearly argue that Clinton's aide Huma Abedin was going down for embezzlement, but they decided that prosecuting her would be more trouble than it was worth. One has to wonder just how far Clinton can push her luck before their interests are roused to the point of taking action.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
09/13/2015 00:00 ||
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The arguments and disclosures about to follow rely on a peculiarity found in Israelis of a certain type. You could say that Israelis of that type are a breed on their own. After all: picture a Greek, or a Scot who makes a living out of running down Greece or Scotland. If you can't keep a straight face, then try it with an Israeli. Picture an Israeli who crafts a career, and makes good money out of bad mouthing Israel. A quick scout around NGO Monitor's website divulges case studies by the cupboard-full on this peculiar breed.
To skip to a practice not very different: we recall the paparazzi, and how they fed like vampire bats off the late Princess Di. A scandal story or photo of a stolen private moment made some media workers rich. So it is with Israel and her paparazzi hounders and "moral minders." A complete economic sector lives on stories that vaunt the inhumanity, crimes and misdemeanors of Israel's leaders and soldiers.
"Made in Israel" crime pays. Europeans and anti-Zionist philanthropists write blank checks for stories on Israel behaving badly. The UN and BDS linked groups can't get enough of this bad behavior. Fat rewards incentivize Israeli suppliers of the precious bad stories for world consumption. It's no accident that a large part of this breed's activity is spent on courting donors, which means dancing to the donors' tune, which will always be, towards Israel, a bitter tune. The big money is never on sweet, pro-Israel tunes. You'd never get a sweet tune out of Holland, for one.
[FreedomOutpost] And this is how the Constitution is supposed to work. This is how the militia enforcing the Constitution when a federal government has gone tyrannical. Members of the group Oath Keepers are volunteering their services to interpose themselves between Kim Davis and federal marshals should they seek to follow unlawful orders from Judge David Bunning or any other judge in opposition to Kentucky law.
In a statement by Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, he expounded upon the unconstitutional orders of Judge David Bunning:
We believe Federal District Court Judge David Bunning grossly overstepped his bounds and violated Mrs Davis' due process rights, and in particular her right to a jury trial. This judge has assumed unto himself not just the powers of all three branches of government, but has also taken on the powers of judge, jury, and "executioner." What matters to us is not whether you agree with her position on gay marriage or her decision to not issue marriage licenses. What matters is that the judge is violating the Constitution in his anger and desire to punish her for going against his will. We are already being subjected to an unconstitutional imperial presidency, that grew exponentially under both Bush and Obama, expanding the claimed war powers of the president to swallow up our Bill of Rights and circumvent jury trial. The result is an executive branch that claims the absurd power to declare any American an "unlawful combatant" on the say-so of the president alone.
Now we see the rise of an imperial judiciary that not only legislates from the bench but is attempting to expand their "contempt" power to likewise swallow up our Bill of Rights and circumvent jury trial. Both methods are used to allow the powerful office holder to merely point his finger and have his opponent thrown behind bars without a grand jury indictment and without being found guilty by a jury of their peers. No innocent until proven guilty before a jury. Just "guilty" because the leader says so. That is a dictatorship, whether done by a president or by a judge. No one man should have that kind of power in his hands alone to decide guilt and impose a sentence of indefinite detention. Under our Constitution, that dictatorial power does not exist. We must stand against this. And so we will protect her and prevent it from happening again. -- Stewart Rhodes
Um, no. Ms. Davis had a duty to follow the law. If she can't, resignation is perfectly honorable. Ignoring the law leads to anarchy. Then again, she's a Democrat and ignoring the law is what Democrats do...
#1
I'm surprised they weren't there for her first arrest. I'm also surprised that her coworkers and local sheriff cooperated with the feds.
Bunning has to go.
#3
I see the return of 'dissenters', term used to label Quakers and other non-Church of England people who were denied public office. Now it will be Christians unless its a state approved sect.
BTW, the law as well as the government were suppose to derive their power from the consent of the governed. We've done away with that. The oligarchs who sit for life, tell you what it is whether the people consent or not.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[HotAir] Prepare to be shocked. Regardless of what turns up in Hillary Clinton's emails in the weeks and months to come, you won't need to worry about the Justice Department coming along and dragging the former Secretary of State off in handcuffs. Deleting all of those emails was, in the opinion of the nation's top cops, absolutely fine and dandy. 
